Time Warner rings in new network. How's 128 megabytes per second sound?

Time Warner will sink $25 million in a new high-speed network for select parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn.

By
Matthew Shaer /
August 28, 2012

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Reuters

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The Flatiron district, pictured here, will be one of the New York neighborhoods connected to a new high-speed fiber network from Time Warner.

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Time Warner is investing $25 million in a high-speed fiber broadband network in New York City.

The company will make the news official at a press conference at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, but company representatives have already disclosed plenty of details on the project. Among them, according to CNET: The network will clock in at 1 gigabit (128 megabytes) per second, and extend from Brooklyn to select sections of Lower Manhattan, including the Flatiron and financial districts, where plenty of tech and business firms are housed.

"We’re making the investment to expand into areas much more aggressively than we ever have before," Ken Fitzpatrick, president of business services for Time Warner Cable’s East region, told Businessweek. "We’re positioning New York City as a much more tech-savvy place to work."

The exact roll-out date is unclear, as are the prices that Time Warner will charge for access to the network.

As more and more Americans gobble down more and more data – the increased popularity of streaming video is partly to blame – Internet service providers have sought to expand their network capacity. In July, Google introduced an ultra-high-speed network called Google Fiber, which will be rolled out this fall to residents of Kansas City. The service will be available at two price points: $70 for just the Internet, or $120 for Google Fiber TV package.

To sweeten the deal, if you sign up for Google Fiber TV, the company will toss in the (quite popular) Nexus 7 tablet. The Nexus 7 will be used as a remote control. Load the thing up with the Google TV app, and flip the channels by touch screen. Nice touch.

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